Victorian Consciousness

My art show at Idle Hand Tattoo goes up on Tuesday. The Opening is Friday the 6th, from 8pm-10pm. Check out the flier but know: THE FLIER IS WRONG!!!! THE DATES ARE WRONG! I WILL FIX IT SOON!!
Yes, I'm happy to be showing in a place where I can put up ALL art work, no matter how disturbing! I will be showing "risk it all" the lovely picture of a kid with a gun in his/her mouth that I produced in my depths of despair about America killing Afghani children (doesn't that war seem long ago? When I painted that it seemed so pointless, our stupid leaders and their flagrant and obscene disregard of the future--since kids experience war too, and they represent the future. Children are clay, and only good things should be imprinted upon their minds, if we want the human race to progress).
I am stressing out, slightly. I seem only able to take naps.
In other regards, work is good, as I now feel comfortable to be my dorky self and get all excited about book on decorative wall painting and "Victorian Consciousness" around my coworkers.

I want the book that these illustrations are from. And then I want them tattooed all over my body.
Books finished recently:
Kushiel's Avatar-the ending behemoth of the supposedly bodice-ripper (according to ORION and other literary snobs) S&M fantasy saga that I and Mykle have been reading...recommended by brother Jordan. God, that sounds bad, doesn't it? The writing is totally terrible: his hair is "like silk" or as dark as "a raven's wing", the fields are perfumed with flowers, he is "clad" in a "velvet doublet", his "phallus" parts her "nether lips" (!!!), etc. etc. BUT the heroine is strong and ass-kicking and complex and in the end it is all about real human love, even though everyone has at least three french-sounding names.
Idlewild- was O.k. It is Sci-Fi, and written by the son of Carl Sagan. I felt very detached from all the characters though, I kept having the feeling that I was watching the story through a veil. The plot is good, if the author had cared to embellish it the story could have been three times as long. There was a lot of meaty stuff to work with that I think just got passed over.
Now Reading: The Summer Country by Jame Hetley (NOT Hetfield, that's the lead singer for Metallica, you metalheads!)
Charles DeLint liked it, and he says so on the cover. That makes sense, cause it is sort of like Charles DeLint: the plot deals with the intersection of the old world of fairy and the modern world of bad childhoods and traffic jams. I like things like this, probably due to my childhood fixation with wanting to discover that I am actually an elfin princess with magical powers who can walk between worlds and ride on unicorns. Therefore, reading Charles DeLint seems to be to be somewhat masturbatory. It's like too much Kai-childhood wish fullfillment going on. I wish I had discovered him 15 years ago. That said, so far, this book rules. It is gritty and has sex and swearing in it, as well as evil fairy lords and Pendragons and bone-crunchy violence. Along the lines of American Gods. It might be better than Charles DeLint, in fact, cause it's not so twee.

It's obvious that I am on a fantasy/sci-fi kick right now. I feel safe with it. I SHOULD read "Chiva" and "We regret to Inform you that tommorow we will be killed with our families", but so far I'm a bit scared. So it's either Victorian Consciouness (god, I love that phrase) e.g. "Possession" and "My Blue Notebook" (I am reading this soon-the diary of a famed fin de'siecle courtesan) or Fantasy.
Mayhap I shall return anon

This is my life

Today I spent hours crosslegged on my rainbow beadspread, sewing beads on the racchus (a word from Mykle meaning the shaft of a feather) of peacock feathers. For fun. I was DRIVEN, people, I couldn't help it.
Tonight we may make T'shirts with Dave Van Ronk on them due to us listening almost exclusivley to that man for the last 400 years (that's an exagerration). I am in the the process of making a very small hat that is a velvet flower-- blanket-stitched on the sides with beads and an elastic headstrap. If yer lucky I''ll put a ridiculous picture of me wearing it on here soon.
This is my idea: I will make an online store called "Stuff that Kai makes on Saturdays when she is hungover/feeling fine". It will be a grab-bag shop...an assortment of a different thing every week! Todays output was pretty badass...and for some reason, when I've made stuff I feel better almost than having been part of some outdoor activity. Which means I'm destined to stay indoors for the next 400 years (!) and not ever get tan or svelte. Oh fucking well, eh? Today Mykle called me a mushroom and I'd say that's not far off the mark.

So all in all, my life is perfect. I got paid for art last night too, which is the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cheerleader on top of the elephant in the crystal light garden of magic. Actually replace that chherleader with Louise Brooks:

doodly-doo

Hmmmmm.....

So I was googling for images of Kiki last night and lo, the first one I found happened to come from the website of The Kitchen Syncopators , a charming and talented jug band (buy their excellent CDs and you won't regret it!) first seen playing on the streets of Santa Cruz and who later stayed at Rigg St. where we tormented them by staying up late drinking beer and listening to Nate Dogg and not letting their travel-worn souls get any sleep. They left in the morning without saying goodbye. I daresay anyone in their right minds would have done the same. What are the chances, though, of them having the most easily accessible picture of Kiki de Montparnasse, whom, I am pretty sure, NEVER housed them while they were on tour??!!!!

Kiki de Montparnasse

This photographer is amazing--sort of the NanGoldin confessional deeply-personal style but not focused on friends. Elinor Carucci takes photographs of her family. In the photos she is the daughter and the lover, mainly, and one is struck by the way the family interacts with such ease in their nakedness and the camera doesn't seem to intrude hardly at all as they kiss and lie around and take baths and fight.
I must admit, I have seen a lot of this woman's photos reproduced in art magazines and they are vastly superior to the ones on the website, which are a bit grainy. There are a damn lot of them, though.
Enjoy, especially you, Summer Pierre.

In other worlds, I am seeing a lot of music this weekend, and a lot of family and friends. Which is good cause I am missing people right now. Not in a sobbing way though, in sort of a misty-eyed golden-light-infused nostalgic way.

Here's something that applies to my state right now, it's an excerpt from something I wrote a long time ago:

"We have been in this room for days now, hours pool on the floor like wax from the countless candles, mirrors reflect mirrors reflect me: lips a blood-cherry smear, eyes black diamonds of obliteration."

WEEEE!

I cannabalized Michelle's livejournal for this post:
Make the conjoined twins' skeleton spin around in circles by going here! It is fun and slightly morbid!

Devastated by G and Ts

I did these a while ago while drinking fruity drinks at the Orbit Room. The bartender there is named Alberta and she looks like a cartoon- black tousled pageboy hair, snow-white skin, and cherry red lips, slightly crosseyed, big grin- and I drew her too, but Mykle gave her the drawing. I am a huge fan of the blank-backed coaster- an absorbant, durable, and portable surface for bar-artists like myself.
I can't really believe I am talking about booze since it is 6:15 and I am still devastated from drinking gin at the Casanova (on Valencia...ornamented with those rad 50's paintings of Polynesian girls with blue-highlights in their hair and hanging glass grapes) with Orion last night, who is back from his weekend in So Cal with Michelle. They met each other's mothers, and Michelle met Orion's ex-wife Lauren. Apparently everyone got along famously. It makes me think it is really strange that Mykle and my folks have not yet met. We are going on 3 years here.....

I am keeping a collection in my head of interesting things I see on the way to/from work. Yesterday I saw a monk in brown robes with a long beard and a knotted brown..tonsure?..no I think that word is wrong...Rope-belt, who was wearing a blank brown ball-cap the same color as his robe. Must be a special-issue hat for the monk softball team. Today I passed a car with the licenseplate "LIONKAI" and then it was plastered with stickers for the old-man club called The Lions. You know, like The Masons. Also today I gave a peice of tape to a scary speed freak guy who was chowing down on a bag of those sour apple chewy candies (this was at 9:30 in the morning), then the same guy pulled of a huge hunting knife with a serated base on the bus and told his hippie-thug friend how he would disembowl someone by twisting it after stabbing it in their liver. Imagine me listening to this in my enormous aviator sunglasses with my headache pounding away. Ouch.

Come one, come all

A show with a poster by MEEEEEE! This venue is Fantastic so therefore the show will be too, with our favorite moppets from Vermont!

Artistica Verbosa

I have been staring at art on the internet for hours. Days.Weeks.
And now I'm going to share my finds with you.
How lucky you are!
First we have a thing from livejournal, a girl in Arkansas who posted her thesis (!) online. The poetry is beautiful and mysterious and subtle (and easy to read) and has gorgeous pictures to go along with it of BIRD SKELETONS as well as other enticing and shadowed things!! Hooray!
Next there is Royal Art Lodge a group of strange Canadians who really love that old time religon. I have never before seen art this morose or charming. It makes me want to form a cult and go sit in the snow and chant outside of their Canadian Art clubhouse!
Next is a child prodigy (hahaha, she's actually 20...but that's younger than I!) from Australia who does color pencil drawings of softly glowing deer and whippets and little girls. These things by Lili look like they've been painted by a magic fairy wand. Really splendid and enormous talent.
My favorite craft site is Thimble, which is really some girl's journal. There is a huge online community of girls as crafty...NO! CRAFTIER than I!!!!!!!!!! They make a billion things and own sergers and sell their cute-as-a-button products and have babies and stuffed animal contests and know html. I mean, its really amazing. Also they seem to have kickass taste in music and live in the midwest. Or maybe thats just my impression.
My girl Michelle De La Caridad Medina (that is ACTUALLY her real name) not only has the most compelling peals of bell-like laughter erupting from her milk-white throat all the damn time she ALSO takes beautiful pictures and puts them here.
Michelle also is the one to blame for my online art-brain expansion. She ensnared me with sites like this one from Japan-also with an extraordinarily young artist. It blows me away this stuff.....someone likes Aubrey Beardsley as much as I. And posesses incredible draughtmanship.
Anyhow, that's it for now.Hope you enjoy and dont think me too much an INTERNET GEEK. Ha.
We are going to watch the Maltese Falcon.

erte

my blog broke

this is a test...

ghormenghast

The boys are in Denver trying to get jobs in Antarctica for this fall, so they too can work hard in a cold yard, drink, enjoy a badass atmosphere (forgive me but the experience of it sort of sounds like that isolated summer camp type feeling-rampant alcoholism and hijinks (tons of sex, funny costumes, big machinery etc.) abound? I don't know...maybe I shouldn't have read this article) and get paid A LOT of money. I am celebrating my alone time by preposing to hang out with all of my incredibly beautiful and hot and creative girlfriends: Michelle, Jen and Jess, Zina Aimee and Rosey.
In other news: work makes me feel like a brain-damaged loser. I am always in the way, I always forget stuff and do things wrong and can't just be normal and MYSELF. I think my coworkers see me as a very quiet person, which is funny. (Actually, I think I have calmed down and gotten quieter since I've moved). I'm this meek little thing, hating herself in a corner. If I can't excel at a 10$/hr job that I have essentially been doing my whole adult life then I really have some problems. This is when I start freaking out about all of the drugs I did when I was a teenager and wondering if I have a little deficiency.
Then I get home and paint and read and work on my little projects : keeping a blog, learning HTML and working on my website, making mixes, writing letters, etc. and SUDDENLY I feel worthwhile again. Like, that just happened right now.
New art interest: the Wyeths (Andrew and N.C., actually). The desolation of their paintings is so intimate yet so universal. Goddamn. It is the perfect American Gothic.
Old Art Interest that continues due to my reading: Sir Edward Burne-Jones. I read this thing about the Pre-Rapphaelites and how amazing it was that they painted these scenes of ultimate sylvan perfection replete with angels and maidens and lillies and golden heavenly life just at the time when London was crammed with poor ghettos of starving people choking to death on industrial fumes and polluted water (illustrated by Dore, who was often a realist). I personally think it makes sense. Art encompasses the dreams of the populace sometimes. Though I think in this case, the rich had more of a chance to dream of Holy Natural Perfection than the poor.
Anyhow, enough of this art stuff. I'm going to a poetry reading.

capsized again

That last one looked bad cause I scanned it at a low resolution. Here's the one I did on...Sunday? I think? I sort of don't like it cause it looks a lot like me when I was sad.

i mean, paintbrush

i did this tonight, in the pantry. I think it's ok. She's ruther grey, but she goes against the normal exotic princess types that usually pour from my painbrush. I turned it out in about an hour. I'm all about rapid production of things I consider beautiful.

I'm reading "Possession" by A.S. Byatt and it is breaking my heart with the beauty of language. It's about PreRaphaelite romance that is discovered by two British scholars in the 80's through the discovery of a sheaf of letters. It is about myth, and the subconscious, and Britain, and epic poetry (of course the Victorians would capitalize all those things: Myth and Epic Poetry...) and Fairytales and Romance.
Here's Kai swooning with satisfaction.....

La Musica y La Sirena

Grey day and the cold cloak of air and dove-coloured cloud has settled over the house like ash.
Speaking to my folks by phone while perched on the pantry cutting slips of a 1960s wildflower brochure into a CD case for Orions mix Cd- entitled "You give me bruises I give you mixes".
This morning woke up to the tyranny of the time change and ate mint ice cream pie for breakfast. The tide of the music sloshes over me, I cannot move without it. Stilled I sit on the comforter, striped legs drawn up under my chin and think of all the things I haven't.....
Now the rain starts and the stairs creak and the turtledoves on the window ledge finally coo out of sight.
There is only the sound of violin and the darkening sky to break my heart today.

Hey wow!

It's a poem- apparantly the ONLY poem I have written in the last 4 years that is NOT about you-know-what and therefore, you-know-who! Jeez, rereading your journal is sooo FUN and puts you in SUCH a fantastic mood where you hang out in the pantry and cry, and everyone goes "OOOh Kai, what's the matter" and you say "Booo HOO HOO I have baggage, waaaah", and then you feel compelled to share this poem (the only uplifting one in the whole damn journal practically) about taking nudie art photos with your girlfriends in a beautiful valley and feeling super out-of-place in your humanity (I know you aren't supposed to explain poems...your just supposed to read them and then FEEL what they mean, but OH WELL)

Le Poeme
Enjoy- I know I DO.

In other news: I bought lots of music today...with trade from trading in old CDs! WOW! I bought more Jolie Holland and Kate Bush and the new Magnolia Electric CO. and 16 Horsepower. I needed this, new words and tunes. The new Faint album is good too, by the way. I like it when guys sing about reapplying makeup.